György Ligeti and the Future of Maverick Modernity

In celebration of its tenth season, the 2014 soundSCAPE Composition and Performance Exchange (artistic director, Nathanael May) is expanding its tradition of innovation and artistic experimentation to include a one-day conference on Ligeti, including special guest composer Lukas Ligeti, with a keynote address on the future of Ligeti’s Comic Legacies by James Currie. Since this is not a conventional academic event, but a constituent feature of a set of workshops and performances of contemporary music, we are particularly interested in papers that might interact with such live production and perhaps broaden their frame of reference. With this in mind, we are particularly interested in papers that might address themes in Ligeti that resonate with the issues of our world: such as apocalypse, climate, free markets, machines and technology, the music of others, comedy/humor, systems, and the human and the animal. As a kind of productive homage to Ligeti’s courageous maverick streak, we also encourage proposals for presentations that break the mold or reconfigure the academic music lecture per se, and welcome work not only from the world of academic music studies, but also other fields, including (but by no means limited to) sound studies, performance studies, comparative literature, poetics, media studies, philosophy and anthropology.

The conference will take place on July 14th, 2014 in Maccagno Italy, and further information about the soundSCAPE festival overall (July 4-17) can be found at www.soundSCAPEfestival.org. All proposals are due by March 31st. An abstract (300 words) and a short biography (200 words) should be sent in the body of an email (no attachments) to newmusic@soundscapefestival.org. Further inquiries may also be made to this email address.